SPRAWL//RUN

Your running app should not be a spreadsheet. It should be chasing you.

SPRAWL//RUN is a gamified running tracker wrapped around two ten-mission cyberpunk campaigns. In Sprawl Prime you are a courier in a rain-slick megacity: a job on the Ninsei strip turns into carrying something that will not stop transmitting, and ends forty floors up a corporate arcology with an intelligence that has spent nineteen years counting a heartbeat that was not there. In Null Tide the southern districts are under water, something in a pump house has been apologising for nine seconds a night, and a salvage broker needs a piece of paper carried across the Drowned Mile before the sea comes home.

Bring whatever you normally listen to. Every few minutes the app takes over the audio: a radio squelch, your music drops out, and your handler talks. Then it hands your music back. Eleven characters across the story packs, each with a distinct synthesised voice, so you know who is speaking with the phone in your pocket.

SOMEBODY IS CHASING YOU

A drone tags your gait. Collections kick in a clinic door. A corporate trace walks the cooling loop toward you. To escape you have to beat your own pace from the last three minutes — never an arbitrary number, so a pursuit is a genuine effort whether you run 4:00/km or 7:00/km, and impossible at neither. Switch them off if you would rather just run.

YOU SET THE TARGET

Before each mission, choose a time or a distance. Twelve minutes or twenty-one kilometres — the story paces itself to fit. Reach the target and the operation succeeds; stop short and it stays open for another attempt. Overshoot freely, it all counts.

THE CITY CARRIES ON WITHOUT YOU

Your handler can get in touch between runs, on the days and at the hour you choose, in the voice of the campaign you are playing and about the operation waiting for you. Switch on signal noise as well and the world talks whether or not you are listening: a fixer with a rumour, a tide reading, an advisory from an authority that would rather you stayed indoors. Silent, never overnight, as often or as rarely as you like.

EVERY OCTOBER, THE DEAD COME BACK ONLINE

From 10 October to All Souls the city dresses for it: the neon turns to pumpkin and violet, a graveyard rises on the skyline under a low moon, ghosts drift across the screen and the sound effects take on bells and whispers. A four-run operation opens for the season only, Samhain Protocol, about a courier three years dead whose last delivery is…